Programming courses are generally bad. Just find free stuff online and mess with it on your own.

So in regurnds* to Quogue**, I need to restructure my objects a lot. Currently, for collision detection, I have a bunch of loose functions. checkWallCollision, checkFloorCollision, etc. For check what the current player is running into. However, in this particular case, I also have projectiles, which should have their own wall/player collision detection routines. One possibility is overloading the function, which is sort of a kludge and not really expandable and not at all reusable.

Again this is something where proper inheritance would make things easier. I can think of some pointery wizardfuck*** to emulize it though. We shall see.

Also moving my input functions from MoveFunctions.bas to InputFunctions.bas is breaking them and I can't tell why because I'm just copying and pasting exactly :/

---edit---

Fixed this. Apparently MoveFunctions.bi had a mismatch in the function declaration in the header and in the definition. Predictably, this was causing the linker to freak out. Less predictably, it was causing the compiler to say something was wrong an an entirely different header.

So if moving stuff around broke it, honest to god, why was it even running in the first place :(

I need to restructure my code. The fewer variable I have to pass the better.

* This is a portmanteau but I forgot what it's made of :<** also a portmanteau. This means Quake-Rogue.

*** Ahem. I believe that you can get a similar effect using composition instead of inheritance. That is to say, I'd have a base actor class that has, as a component, one or more more specific... classes. So instead of having Dog and Cat inhereit from Animal, I'd have Animal either be made of a dog or a cat. Sort of. IDK :T

About to finish Dasa Pass. The entire IVS Kran bit up through... well, Bluff Eversmoking is pretty amazing, and Dasa's a nice followup to that. One detail I noticed is how it goes to day from night as you go through the levels.

System Shock-

I made the mining laser asplode :3c Now I got some email to go help people on deck 6.

7 Days a Skeptic -

Just started this. on Tuesday.

---edit---

Okay, beat 7 Days. I think the biggest problem is that it's ENTIRELY 5 Days. Only in space. You know pretty much exactly what's going to happen and the only major story explanation is a big info dump at the end. And the puzzles were a bit dumb. One, in particular, has you hide in a shadow. While this makes sense when you read it in a faq, there's no sort of hint that indicates that hiding in the shadow is actually something you can do, there's a fairly narrow area where this even works, and you literally have to move into position. It'd have been clearer if you could've clicked the object and interacted with it to hide behind it.

This is why I don't take Yahtzee's reviews seriously. He bitches about things he does in his own games. Sure, I'm well aware that "Don't complain if you can't do any better" isn't a valid excuse. In this case, though, Yahtzee probably can do better and just isn't.

What I found it's not entirely the gameplay but the presentation of the gameplay.

Similarly, I deeply value a good, well-balanced battle system in an RPG. Contrary to this value, I absolutely ADORE Ultima 7, Contact, Earthbound, Morrowind, King's Field, and Planescape, which either have rather hands off battle systems (U7, Contact), sort of bland/unbalanced battle systems (Earthbound, Morrowind, King's Field), or a solid battle system that's really, really downplayed in contect of the rest of the game (Planescape).

I think it's because each of these games has a really big emphasis on exploration and experimentation, which I value more than solid combat.

Similarly I think this is why FSR would bug me. Myst puzzles, as I said, reward experimentation. FSR's puzzles sound like they don't.

Baldur's Gate series had no duds. 2 games, 2 expansions, 2 engine spin-offs... and 1 of those spin-offs having an expansion too. Sure Icewind Dale wasn't as intricate as the BG games, but they were still well made and very fun to play.

I really liked Eraserhead but I think I'm the only person that took it entirely at face value. It's not some complex allegory about something. It's just a simple tale about a sad, single father, living in a depressing industrial wasteland trying to raise his mutant baby, while slowly going insane. Sometimes a penis is only a sailboat, afterall.

SPEAKING OF deconstructing videogame imagery/standards, Part of me wants to bring up PopMatters' review of Myst, and a substantially larger part of me wants to note that PopMatters' is full of crap.

As it stands, though, from an art perspective, Myst is pretty cool (talking the series as a whole, here). (Did I even bring this up yet?) It's very metafictional, and deals with the relation between a creator and their art, and the reader and art. And in a broader sense, themes of godhood and even the nature of reality come up.

(There's also that whole super-meta-clusterful of Rand Miller doubling as the author of the games in the real world, and the author of the games in the fictional setting too).

And from a puzzle-design perspective, Riven is probably the most artful and intricate puzzle in an adventure game I can think of, just in terms of how connected everything is.

It's also noteworthy that in most of the games the puzzles tend to relate to the story/theme/history of the worlds,

that reminds me. When fixing/rewriting some of my code last week, I discovered that movement had stopped working (I think it was movement.) Looking at it, however it was written and had no logical reason to work. Except it WAS working. So it wasn't so much WTF that was working before! as it was WTF? That was working before?

---edit---

Holy goddamn I'm retarded.

1. Forgot to put header file in #ifndef/#endif clause to make sure it wouldn't circularly define itself. this was the enum file, hence enums not working.2. I included a .bas file instead of a header and started getting linker errors.

It's glitchy, the magic system's dumb (Too few MP unless you grind to get MP up; to few MP == fewer spell casts = spells don't level up that fast; also a lot of useless spells anyway), sort of uneven difficulty, and I mean, as far as action RPGs go, I like really *smooth* things like Terranigma and not "Stand around and hold the B button to charge your sword power." Also the collision detection and damage detection is... off.

It's just a really sloppy game. It's not really bad, but there are better things I could play, so why bother?

Persona 1's localization was far more coherent than FFT's or BoF2's. Okay, so it was whitewashed (except they made mark black and fuck y'all black mark is awesome). Whatever. There were some punctuational* issues but when there WERE typos they were the sort of typos that people that speak english make and not like something out of Tlon or the sort of dumbitude that 78641 parodies. Gameplay wise the dungeon designs are lacking and the battles are sort of slow, but they're more interesting than "mash attack and win" so they're slower but relatively more involving than most games of the era.

So what about Quintet? Does Actraiser count? Was Granstream Saga any good? HG101 says it's the best in the series, but common logic + youtube says HG101 is full of shit (AGAIN)**. If we're just looking at the trilogy strictly, too short (even though I thought it was perfect~~~)

* How the hell is this a word :(** Also related to Persona, or rather IS, HG101 apparently plays a big role in continuing stupid rumors about nazi imagery being why IS never got a US release. I can think of several reasons why this is false. One of them is Wolfenstein 3D. Another is a movie that came out last week.